My partner is away for a few days so I thought I’d watch some of the films in my queue that she may have less interest in. The first of these was Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a 2011 documentary of the day-to-day life of Jiro Ono, the oldest Michelin 3-starred chef in the world. It’s a fantastic film that uses a spare style to tell the compelling story of a man who loves what he does and continually strives for perfection.
Ten years ago, I worked behind a sushi counter in New York. It was a position that I “fell into.” Bond Street opened in April of 1998 and I was one of the original opening crew. The position that I initially was hired for was as an assistant pastry cook. In 1999 I moved upstairs into the hot kitchen and moved my way through the various stations, becoming a sort of jack-of-all-trades by the end of the year.
In 2000, the chef asked me if I’d like to learn sushi. Up until this point, the sushi bar had only one non-Japanese person, Mikey, a Filipino musician/surfer from Austin, who’d started a few months earlier. Mikey smoothed the way for me and a few others who followed in our footsteps to learn sushi there.
Our training was a hyper-condensed version of what you see in the film, which takes 10 years to learn and a lifetime to perfect. Even so, I knew I was working in a quality house. Everyone was dedicated to pushing the limits of what was “the best.” We started at noon and didn’t finish until after beer and knife sharpening around two in the morning. I learned a lot in those two years and the chefs once paid me the highest compliment, saying I was more Japanese than Japanese. They also told me I had progressed through the stations faster than anyone before me or since, though I think this had more to do with their needs than my ability.
I only did this for about two years. I was not ready to put in the work. I was not cut out to be a sushi shokunin.
Anyway, this movie brought those days back to me, and reminded me as well, of my trip to Tokyo in 2006, when I got to visit Tsukiji Market with some former Bond Street colleagues who had gone back to Japan. That was an incredible experience and I’ll have to tell you about it sometime.
travels in food / detours in ordinary 